WABAR 175

which has been in the British Museum for all but fifty
years !

So far as I was concerned the search for Wabar and the
giant iron was over. I could now honourably bequeath the
task to my successors— to younger men or women who may
not be deterred by my barren search for the fabled ruins from
embarking upon similar enterprises in the great sands of
Arabia. I had satisfied myself that there was no vestige of
human antiquity among the * castles ' to which JAli had
guided me so faithfully and successfully ; and, if the only
likely locality known to my guides had proved so disappoint-
ing, I concluded as the result of my researches up-to-date, as
I was yet to do from my subsequent experience of the great
desert, that there is little likelihood of ancient ruins being
found anywhere in the Rub' al Khali. I think that the
further conclusion is justified that the Empty Quarter in its
widest sense has in all probability been unsuitable for human
occupation—otherwise than by nomads—since a time long
anterior to the beginnings of civilisation. The process of
desiccation must have begun, and the great rivers must have
ceased to flow, before the dawn of serious history—perhaps
when the retreating ice-cap of the Pleistocene changed the
climate of the earth's middle belt, stretching from the Sahara
and the Libyan Desert across Arabia into the deserts of
Central Asia. In the flints1 and shells of those times we have
the memory of men inhabiting a land made fair by flowing
rivers—but they were the remote ancestors of those that
built the first houses of which we have any cognisance.

What then of the legend ? So far as the Rub4 al Khali is
concerned it is a myth and no more. We must seek elsewhere
the site that gave rise to it, and perhaps the clue to it is con-
tained in the first line of the ballad that opens this chapter.
That the great King 'Ad existed once upon a time can

1 Miss G. Caton-Thompson, who has kindly examined the flint imple-
ments collected by me at various localities in the Rub* al Khali, is satisfied
that they are all of Neolithic type and that none of them can be ascribed
to Palaeolithic or Mesolithic times. As a rough guide to prehistoric chrono-
logy she equates the end of the Neolithic period with circa 5000 B.C. in the
Libyan Desert. If we assume similar conditions in the Arabian Desert it
would seem that the flowing rivers of the Bub' al Khali lasted almost to the
beginnings of the earliest known civilisations (Egypt and Mesopotamia).